a singular fate
by closingdoors
Summary: 'It is always the heroes that fall first in the movies. He always thought she'd die for something real. Not like this. Never like this.' COMPLETE.


there's no chance  
at all:  
we are all trapped  
by a singular  
fate  
- Alone With Everybody, Charles Bukowski

* * *

**Disclaimer: **Still not Andrew Marlowe. Unless he's a girl. Then I could be Andrew Marlowe. I wrote this for personal reasons and this story was not meant to stay up for more than one night, but due to many beautiful reviews/PM's I've received I have decided to leave this up for those of you that it has helped.

* * *

There is no cure.

He has all this money. All this stupid, worthless money that he could throw at any doctor he wanted, but no matter how much he gave, no matter how much he cried, begged, sobbed, there was no cure. There's nothing he can do but watch her slowly fade away. And somehow that's supposed to be okay. All the _life expectancy is higher now because of medical breakthroughs_ speeches are supposed to motivate him. They tell him words like _bradykinesia _and _tremor. _This knowledge is supposed to calm him.

There is no cure. She is dying. He has to watch it all and do nothing.

It is always the heroes that fall first in the movies. He always thought she'd die for something real. Not like this. Never like this.

* * *

She'd pushed him away when he first noticed the signs. It had been the little things that had amounted up to one big problem. She'd walk into a room and forget why she was there. He'd laugh. Her handwriting changed. Her left arm was always so tense, sometimes she trembled and it wasn't in the good way. The way that made it difficult for her to grip a pen, still managing to tell him to: _Go away. Stop worrying._

Even when she wound her arms around their little girl. Not so little anymore. Eighteen and leaving for college and Kate trembled, arms locked around her daughter and fists tight, eyes wide as she stared at you over Abigail's shoulder, panicked. If Abigail noticed, she didn't say anything, but she seemed to be shaking too. Their daughter was and always will be a silent sufferer, unwilling to share her burdens, a younger imitation of her mother with his eyes.

All the way through the drive back home her fists were curled and her arms were locked, legs trembling.

_Castle, there's something wrong with me. _

And it's the first time he'd ever heard her sound so scared.

One month and two weeks later and the doctor's lips parted and his world caved in on itself.

_Parkinson's disease.  
_

* * *

For the first four years she's fine. They give her medication that controls the pain. So there's that. The symptoms slow down. They're still there. The tremors, smaller, but nonetheless there. Her forgetfulness, her often blank memory and slow process of the world around her. Lessened but there.

Abigail buys an apartment close to home. Kate had cried and cried about it, because all this time, their little girl had wanted nothing but to explore the world. In her childhood room, she had journals filled with pictures of places she wanted to go, along with souvenirs from everywhere they had been on holiday. When she was eight she had sat down in front of a map with him and pointed one sticky finger towards the north pole.

_I'm gonna go there someday, Daddy. _She'd said. _I'm gonna pet the polar bears and say hi to Santa. _

There are journals in her new apartment. They are filled with her scrawled handwriting, documenting every moment she spends with her mother, a picture for every occasion. And, with the theme of the macabre that runs so inherently through their family, she documents how her mother slowly fades away. Castle's not quite sure how those journals will end when Kate dies. Will there be writing for that too? Or will Kate die, in the middle of her life, in the middle of her untold story, with no lines to say goodbye?

* * *

By the fifth year, she's unable to tie her shoelaces by herself, nor do the buttons on her shirt. The day she resigns from the force, he dresses her, and she stands, motionless. She'd planned on being captain someday. Now at 57 she's giving up the thing she loves the most, other than her family.

_Lieutenant Kate Beckett. Handing in my resignation, sir._

Castle is by her side the whole time. Esposito and Ryan corner him and ask him if he'd join their plans in a get together to say farewell to her days as a cop. He refuses. Such a big thing would make her so sad.

But as she walks from the precinct, every single damn officer, detective and even the captain applaud her. The amazing Katherine Beckett. Until the elevators close and her hand wraps around his, eyes wide as she cries, and there is nothing but silence and the heavy weight of _I'm sorry that we're all such stupid, useless humans.  
_

* * *

He wakes up one day to the sound of crying. It echoes from the front room, and he stands in the doorway watching his daughter cling desperately to his wife, sobbing into her neck.

_Please don't ever die on me momma. _She hasn't called her momma in years. _Please don't ever leave me._

_I love you, my beautiful baby. I'll still love you even when the stars stop shining._

* * *

A routine befalls the two of them. Abigail even takes her trips because even though the symptoms of the disease are worsening, Kate is stable. So they receive e-mails with pictures of Abigail riding on the back of an elephant, her lips stretched wide as she grins, arms in the air, Abigail sitting with a tribe of Aborigines, learning of their culture, Abigail trekking through the Amazon, cheeks burnt and red and sore.

_Look at her. Oh, Castle, look at her. _Kate's too tired for tears now. But there is so much pride in her voice, the emptiness in his heart is forgotten for a while.

* * *

He watches her every day. Watches first her body fail her, working hard at physical therapy but it's never enough. And then her spirit. The way it curls in on itself, and only comes out on the rare sunny days, some days when their daughter is home and Alexis is nearby and his mother makes them all a drink, laughing when everything's just so sad.

* * *

_I can't smile anymore. You know that? _Her words slur. Her face is blank.

_I've known for quite some time._

_I can't smile when I'm happy. It hurts to cry when I'm sad. It hurts to hold our daughter. It hurts all the time, Castle, and I don't know how to make it stop._

_I know. I know._

_You don't._

_I do. You think I don't hurt too?_

_Not the way I do. Never in the way I do.  
_

_I'm watching you die, Kate._

_And I'm watching you watching me die. And I keep waiting to die. So I don't have to see that anymore. I don't want anything anymore, Castle._

_I know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry._

_You're sorry that I'm dying, or sorry that I'm not dead yet?_

* * *

There are good days. Some days walking is easy for her. Some days the muscles in her face co-operate with her brain's commands. Some days she holds their daughter and Alexis and Martha and finally, him, and it doesn't hurt.

Some days.

But some days are so small. And dying is such a very big thing to do.

* * *

It isn't the disease that she will die from. But she will, most likely, die from a consequence of having this disease. If the disease had not been there in the first place, then she never would have died from that at all.

Before she physically dies, she fades away mentally. Most days are just a blur of depression. They're not a couple in love anymore. The last time he had made love to her, she was sixty and she had cried, and he knew even then that it was their last time, and he wished that he could make it special, but she wouldn't stop crying, and he was crying too, and there was no love there, and everything was empty, and everything was gone.

The anxiety fades into the depression and soon enough it's not just depression but dementia. He tries to take care of her. He does.

_Do you wanna go see Abigail? She and Michael just got back from Greece._

_No._

_Do you want them to come here?_

_No._

_Don't you want to see our daughter, Kate?_

_No._

* * *

She forgets the layout of their loft. Their home. The place their daughter had grown up in. She feels no sympathy when his mother dies and he leaves her alone in the house for the funeral. He comes home to find the place empty. Finds her crying in the stairwell, lost and confused and afraid, gripping the bars as though they're the only things stopping her from falling ten stories down to death.

* * *

It's been eighteen years since she was diagnosed. She is seventy years old and she does not die the way he does. His knee gave out a long time ago and there's a crick in his back and his neck that is painful, but he can endure. No, she dies slowly, and she grows terrified with every day that passes, and he spends most of his nights sitting by her restless form in bed, watching the way her chest rises and falls with the tempo of her breathing and praying that it will be her last.

* * *

Their daughter is thirty-nine when she reaches the North Pole. There are pictures of vast landscapes, such a beautiful place, with his beautiful daughter, and the last image of a polar bear makes his heart break all over again.

And even though the dementia has been there for years now, although it's as if she's had a complete personality transplant, he can't help the hope when he prints the pictures and takes them to his dementia-ridden wife.

_She's in the north pole, Kate. Do you see?_

_I see._

_Do you remember when she was little and she said she was gonna be there someday? That she was gonna pet the polar bears and see Santa? Do you?_

_Kate? Do you remember?_

_Do you remember what Abigail said?_

_I'm hungry._

The nurse you'd hired to help care for her makes food for her without saying a word. Her eyes fill with pity. And it only worsens when Kate is unable to eat, and Alexis has to drive the two of you to the hospital.

* * *

She dies twenty-one years after she is diagnosed. In a hospital bed, scared out of her mind, staring into his eyes and body shaking and not knowing who he is.

_Abigail. _

_Abigail's coming, Kate. She's on her way._

_Is her father with her? Is he? She's only six. Don't let her see. Don't let her see. Please.  
_

They're her last words. So desperate and weak and pitiful. He hates her for it.

Abigail doesn't see. She arrives twenty minutes too late and her mother is already gone. Alexis' arms open for her. Castle reaches out his hand. But she turns and walks away, and they do not see her again for three weeks straight. Even at the funeral, it's just Castle and Alexis and her children. Ryan and Jenny and their kids. Esposito.

They had not kept in touch, and it was that day that Castle found out Kate was not alone as she was lowered into the ground. Lanie was buried in the same cemetery, six feet underground.

He doesn't even grieve. Kate had died a long, long time ago.

This is just... The End.

* * *

Abigail's journals are full when she lets her father visit three weeks later. Her eyes are red and she says:

_She never saw me get married. I suppose that's for the best. She was already forgetting when Alexis got married. She was already so far under when her grandkids were born. But she couldn't be a proper Mom, Dad, and that's not fair. That's not fair because she wanted it until she didn't know that she wanted it anymore._

The journals are not filled with her adventures. Those are filed neatly into boxes in her room. These journals are her memories of herself and her mother. It's both stunning and heartbreaking to see images of a younger Kate, healthier then, even though the disease had already settled in. Even though some of the memories consisted of having to stop, to take it easy, for her mother to take her medicine to help relax the tremors. Even if in some, Kate would forget where they were.

And even if it was the last once, when Kate had looked at Abigail, and she had said: _Are you the nurse that went to see the polar bears?_

* * *

He does not have many regrets.

But he regrets the decision to keep the loft once she dies. It's so large, ghosts of memories haunting him, whether it be the image of a three year old Abigail playing with her dolls in the corner, or Kate and Alexis playing laser tag by the pillars, or the huge, heavy door, where it had all started so very long ago.

He closes his eyes to sleep but he has not been restful in decades.

Maybe he will sell the loft, he thinks as he turns in his sleep.

Maybe he will sell the loft, and run from his memories.

Maybe he will sell the loft, and find someplace to die.

Maybe he will-

* * *

**The End  
**


End file.
